The Rhythm of Love Is in Your Sigh--The Great Welsh O'Neders--Pooh Sticks

On every street-across the world
There's thousands of boys-and thousands of girls
Some of them are playing-on electric guitars
Some of them are driving-in their daddy's cars......

The Pooh Sticks were a hilarious band, now pretty much forgotten. You might have thought this band would have had a resurgence with the popularity of Scotland's Belle and Sebastian, but no dice. I heard them at first after buying their Multiple Orgasm Cd at Pier Platters Records in Hoboken. I didn't even realize until after I had listened to the rough hewn cheeky covers and originals that it was in fact a signed copy, one of my few items of musical memorabilia. Great titles here like Indiepop Ain't Noise Pollution,  Force Fed By Love. I really enjoyed that Cd, but as it turned out the Welsh band was up to more insidious things.

Great White Wonder, and their other albums are samples without samples. They beat you to death with pop cliches in all the best ways. They appropriate everything, song titles, lyrics, riffs. But it all sounds great and yet cynical at the same time. I remember going to a reunion concert of a band from my hometown. I actually went to see the headliner, but there were many locals who made the trip to see the opening act. The band went to my high school a few years before me and it was pretty funny, because I kept doing double takes because I thought I knew someone familiar in the audience, but that person was in fact someones older brother, sister, cousin.....

So it is with this music. You think you've been here before, but not exactly. Title like Sweet Baby James, Desperado, When Sunny Gets Blue. Other songs title extol stock 60's & 70's pop themes and youthful idealism---Goodtimes, Young People, The Rhythm of Love. And the music is rehashed also. It's not a great stretch to imagine the Brady family singing some of these songs or the Pooh Sticks running around a spooky Welsh castle with Scooby Doo and the gang. But the genius of the music is that it is so accomplished that on another level, it is AM radio magic. There are people who could listen and enjoy this music without a hint of irony. So Hue Pooh and his crew destroy and create at the same time. It's really is not that hard to mangle a song, but to walk this sonic tightrope is another story altogether.

SOME SUNSHINE FOR YOUR MIDNIGHT!!!!

The CD starts out with a bang--the first three songs are high energy pop, Young People, The Rhythm of Love and Sweet Baby James. Desperado is another winning 70's AOR number. The song I'm In You is a Freebird length Framptonesque ostinato of a rocker--not unintentional I'm sure. Pandora's Box, The Wild One, Forever, and When Sunny Gets Blue are mellow send ups of the singer-writer genre. A lot of what they were trying to do is explained by Trudi in the liner notes of the record. All in all a record I get a big kick out as I do their other albums, all out of print but still available for the most part at a very affordable price.